Domhnall Including Buachalla

Domhnall Ua Buachalla, 1926

Domhnall Ua Buachalla (born February 5, 1866 in Maynooth , County Kildare , Ireland , † October 30, 1963 in Dublin ), also called Donal O'Buachalla or Donal Buckley , was an Irish politician, shopkeeper and member of the First Dáil . He served as the third and last Governor General of the Irish Free State and was later a member of the Irish Council of State .

1916-1932

Ua Buachalla was an advocate of the Irish language and a member of the Irish Volunteers . He was taken prisoner after the Easter Rising in 1916. Like many others who had survived the uprising, he joined the Sinn Féin , a small separatist party that was falsely blamed by the British for the Easter uprising. In the period that followed, the insurgents, led by Éamon de Valera, took over the party and used it as a means to achieve their goals, which included the establishment of an Irish republic. Buachalla, among others, was elected a Sinn Féin MP for Kildare in 1918. He served in the First Dáil from 1918 to 1921 and together with a minority of Sinn Féin MPs (also known as Teachta Dála ) he opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty .

Irish Governor General

In 1927 he was Teachta Dála of Fianna Fáil and later he lost his place in the 1932 elections. At this time, there was an open conflict between Eamon de Valera and the then Governor General James McNeill . The aim of Eamon de Valera's policy was to minimize the importance of the Irish Governor General. After a scandal in which two ministers Eamon de Valeras left a reception at the French embassy after James McNeill joined them, and lengthy disputes as a result, he resigned on October 2, 1932. Eamon de Valera then tried to integrate the function of Governor General in the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court . After this was rejected by the British, the proposal came to transfer the powers of the Governor General to a committee, which also did not meet with approval. After it became clear that the appointment of a successor was inevitable, Eamon de Valera returned to a suggestion conveyed to him by Hugh Kennedy , then Chief Justice:

I happened some years ago, to discuss the Office of Governor-General with an Englishman who formerly held a position of great importance and influence. [..] I mentioned to him that one of the great objections in Ireland to the Vice-Regal and Governor-General position was the inevitable re-creating of the old sham Court, gathering round it all the hovering sycophants and certain social types alien to the National life of the country and the rotting effect of this on social life generally by creating false social values ​​and distracting from National realities. [..] He said to me, 'Why should not the Office be conducted as a purely formal office by a man residing in an ordinary residence in the city, say in Fitzwilliam Square, in such circumstances that nothing of that kind could arise. Then there should be no expectations created either of entertainment or social privilege, round the position. He should be an officer with a bureau for transacting the specific business with which he was entrusted, and his office would begin and end there. With Ua Buachalla, Eamon de Valera chose a comparatively colorless party member who had lost more elections than won. His appointment came as a huge surprise to the public as he was largely unknown until then.

In line with the proposal, a nondescript house in Dublin was selected and the annual salary reduced from £ 24,000 to £ 2,000. De Valera hired Ua Buachalla to hold back publicly and not to carry out any public employment. While he promised the legislature that Dáil Éireann would convene and disband and carry out the other formal duties of a governor-general, he declined all public invitations and stayed in the background as advised by the government. During his term of office he carried out only one public function: to receive the certificate of proof of the French ambassador in 1933 in the name of King George V .

However, with the permission of the king, de Valera was able to transfer some of the powers of the governor general to his government. This included the privilege of submitting proposals for tax legislation and refusing to approve legislation. (One of the few matters on which Ua Buachalla was publicly mentioned was after King George V's death in January 1936, when he had to respond to messages of condolence sent to the Irish by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the US Secretary of State People were judged. One of the titles King George was "King of Ireland", hence the sympathy.)

In addition to formal legal documents, the office of Governor General was mainly known as Seanascal (pronounced: [ ʃanəskəɫ ], shan-as-kall ), the Irish translation of Governor General, during Ua Bachualla's tenure . Despite some demands to formally take over the title of “Seanascal”, “Governor General” remained the official title of the office. Seanascal was just a translation, not a new name for the office.

Disputes with de Valera about expenses

Bachualla, among others, fell out with de Valera over the manner of leaving his office in December 1936 . De Valera used the abdication of Edward VIII to change the Irish constitution so that the office of governor general was abolished. When this was done, he defied Ua Bachualla's threat to pay for the remaining expensive annual rent for his residence following the abrupt abolition of the office. Between 1933 and December 1936, the Irish state reimbursed Ua Buachalla for the expenses it could use to pay the rent of his expensive residence.

From December 1936, however, the state insisted that it no longer had any responsibility for financing the residence. On de Valera's advice, Ua Buachalla had rented the residence for five years, which would have been the actual term of office. So he had to pay the rent for another year for a residence that he could not afford and for which he actually had no longer any purpose, since he was no longer governor-general. Finally, on May 18, 1937, de Valera pushed through against considerable political opposition that Ua Bachualla received a severance payment of £ 2000 and an annual pension of £ 500 for life. Buachalla, among others, accompanied the inauguration of the first President of Ireland, Douglas Hyde at Dublin Castle in June 1938.

Appointed to the State Council in 1959

Ua Buachalla and De Valera subsequently settled their disputes and so, after his election as Irish President, as a symbol of his apology, de Valera appointed Ua Buachalla as his advisory State Councilor.

He later returned to Maynooth to continue his family's hardware store, which had opened in 1853, and now insisted on the Irish spelling of his surname. The street next to his market was named "Buckley's Lane" after him, although his English name form was adopted.

Ua Buachalla died at the age of 97 in a nursing home in Dublin .

literature

• Tim Pat Coogan: Eamon de Valera . HarperPerennial, 1996, ISBN 0-06-092690-2 . (Pages 456 to 459 explain how Eamon de Valera Domhnall Ua chose Buachalla to succeed James McNeill and why the importance of the governor-general was minimized.)

Remarks

1. ↑ See, for example, on page 459 with Tim Pat Coogan.
2. ↑ See, for example, the article Shopkeeper Named As Irish Governor of November 27, 1932 in the New York Times
3. ↑ See pages 458 and 459 by Tim Pat Coogan.
4. ↑ See the article Shopkeeper Named As Irish Governor of November 27, 1932 in the New York Times
5. ↑ page 459 by Tim Pat Coogan.
6. ↑ See page 486 by Tim Pat Coogan.
7. ↑ See the article de Valera Criticized on Buckley Pension: But Irish Free State President Pushes Bill Through Second Reading Despite Opponents in the May 19, 1937 issue of the New York Times .